Are the sharks out for Michele Bachmann, or what? Little miscues that offer a quick, innocent laugh at first become over-reported multiday scandals about how she's the stupidest person alive. She loves serial killers, what an idiot! And now one of Hollywood's prominent songwriters won't even let her use a song she likes, at events. The self-victimizing fundraising letters write themselves.

Kicking off her presidential campaign in Waterloo, Iowa, Michele Bachmann explained the geographic…
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The management for rock and roll star Tom Petty didn't waste any time after Bachmann's campaign launch yesterday to send a cease-and-desist letter, demanding that she never use his song "American Girl" at campaign events again. These requests are not uncommon for Republican candidates, and it's one of the things that genuinely sucks for them. They can never use the easygoing, overplayed songs that they enjoy on FM radio, and they learn that their favorite artists despise them. Democrats' problem, on the other hand, is that they have to feign gratitude to all the musicians who write bad songs for them, kind of like accepting the annual box of dirt-flavored hard taffy that grandmother gives you on birthdays.

If those of us following the Bachmann campaign everyday instead have to hear Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." 500 million times over the next year, then THANKS, TOM PETTY.